During the Chinese equivalent of Black Friday, Alibaba processed more than $5.75 billion in sales. That's 3X more sales in just one day than America saw on Black Friday — on just one company's websites.

Alibaba's sites account for over 60% of the packages delivered in China. It handles roughly 80% of all e-commerce too.

Alibaba has millions of active buyers.Alibaba has 231 million annual active buyers who make 11.3 billion orders per year. It also has more than 2.8 million supplier online storefronts and more than 5,900 product categories.

Alibaba's Taobao is one of the 20 most-visited websites globally. Taobao lets users sell goods to one another (like on eBay) and it features nearly a billion products from more than seven million merchants.

There are two secrets to Alibaba's $100 billion success in its home country. It blocks China's search engine from searching inside two of its most popular web stores, Taobao and Tmall. (To understand that contrast from the norm, Google search "buy ___," and you'll see that Google will pull up product listings from sites like Amazon and Ebay. You can't do that with a Chinese search engine.)

By not allowing search engines to display Taobao or Tmall items in search, Alibaba makes consumers start all their searches withineach virtual store. It can then rake in cash by selling search ads on Taobao and Tmall - acting more like Google in how it makes money than eBay or Amazon.

The company uses a unique payments system. It has Alipay, an online-payments system that relies on escrow. It releases money to sellers only once their buyers are happy with the goods received.

The company has also started to break into the messaging app space. It's app, called Laiwang, had more than 10 million users in January.

There's a annual employee talent show, that's so big that it's held at a local stadium. Employees will rehearse for weeks, and Alibaba's office is filled with photos from past events.

The company's name really is a reference to an old folk tale. Founder Jack Ma said in an interview that he chose the name because people all over the world have heard the story of Alibaba and the forty thieves. "We also registered the name Alimama, in case someone wants to marry us!"